Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  It was the judgment of Lafcadio Hearn that “the Tokugawa period was the happiest in the long life of the nation.”62 History, though it can never quite know the past, inclines tentatively to the same conclusion. How could one, seeing Japan today, suspect that on those now excited islands, only a century ago, lived a people poor but content, enjoying a long epoch of peace under the rule of a military class, and pursuing in quiet isolation the highest aims of literature and art?

  CHAPTER XXIX

  The Political and Moral Foundations

  A tentative approach

  IF, NOW, we try to picture the Japan that died in 1853, we should remember that it may be as hard to understand, as it might be to fight, a people five thousand miles distant, and differing from us in color and language, government and religion, manners and morals, character and ideals, literature and art. Hearn was more intimate with Japan than any other Western writer of his time, and yet he spoke of “the immense difficulty of perceiving and comprehending what underlies the surface of Japanese life.”1 “Your information about us,” a genial Japanese essayist reminds the Occident, “is based on the meagre translations of our immense literature, if not on the unreliable anecdotes of passing travelers. . . . We Asiatics are often appalled by the curious web of facts and fancies which has been woven concerning us. We are pictured as living on the perfume of the lotus, if not on mice and cockroaches.”2 What follows, therefore, is a tentative approach—based upon the briefest direct acquaintance—to Japanese civilization and character; each student must correct it by long and personal experience. The first lesson of philosophy is that we may all be mistaken.

  I. THE SAMURAI

  The powerless emperor—The powers of the “shogun”—The sword of the “Samurai”—The code of the “Samurai”—“Hara-kiri”—The Forty-seven “Ronin”—A commuted sentence

  Theoretically at the head of the nation was the divine emperor. The actually ruling house—the hereditary shogunate—allowed the emperor and his court $25,000 a year for maintaining the impressive and useful fiction of uninterrupted rule.* Many people of the court practised some domestic handicraft to sustain themselves: some made umbrellas, others made chopsticks, or toothpicks, or playing cards. The Tokugawa shoguns made it a principle to leave the emperor no authority whatever, to seclude him from the people, to surround him with women, and to weaken him with effeminacy and idleness. The imperial family yielded its powers gracefully, and contented itself with dictating the fashions of aristocratic dress.3

  Meanwhile the shogun luxuriated in the slowly growing wealth of Japan, and assumed prerogatives normally belonging to the emperor. When he was borne through the streets in his ox-carriage or palanquin the police required every house along the route, and all the shutters of upper windows, to be closed; all fires were to be extinguished, all dogs and cats were to be locked up, and the people themselves were to kneel by the roadside with their heads upon their hands and their hands upon the ground.4 The shogun had a large personal retinue, including four jesters, and eight cultured ladies dedicated to entertain him without reserve.5 He was advised by a cabinet of twelve members: a “Great Senior,” five “Seniors” or ministers, and six “Sub-Elders” who formed a junior council. As in China, a Board of Censors supervised all administrative offices, and kept watch upon the feudal lords. These lords, or Daimyo (“Great Name”), formally acknowledged allegiance only to the emperor; and some of them, like the Shimadzu family that ruled Satsuma, successfully limited the shogun’s authority, and finally overthrew it.

  Below the lords were the baronets, and below these the squires; and serving the lords were a million or more Samurai—sword-bearing guardsmen. The basic principle of Japanese feudal society was that every gentleman was a soldier, and every soldier a gentleman;6 here lay the sharpest difference between Japan and that pacific China which thought that every gentleman should be a scholar rather than a warrior. Though they loved, and partly formed themselves on, such swashbuckling novels as the Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Samurai scorned mere learning, and called the literary savant a book-smelling sot.7 They had many privileges: they were exempt from taxation, received a regular stipend of rice from the baron whom they served, and performed no labor except occasionally to die for their country. They looked down upon love as a graceful game, and preferred Greek friendship; they made a business of gambling and brawling, and kept their swords in condition by paying the executioner to let them cut off condemned heads.8 His sword, in Iyeyasu’s famous phrase, was “the soul of the Samurai” and found remarkably frequent expression despite prolonged national peace. He had the right, according to Iyeyasu9, to cut down at once any member of the lower classes who offended him; and when his steel was new and he wished to make trial of it, he was as likely to try it on a beggar as on a dog.10 “A famous swordsman having obtained a new sword,” says Longford, “took up his place by the Nihon Bashi (the central bridge of Yedo) to await a chance of testing it. By and by a fat peasant came along, merrily drunk, and the swordsman dealt him the Nashi-wari (pear-splitter) so effectively that he cut him right through from the top of his head down to the fork. The peasant continued on his way, not knowing that anything had happened to him, till he stumbled against a coolie, and fell in two neatly severed pieces.”11 Of such trivial consequence is the difference, so troublesome to philosophers, between the One and the Many.

  The Samurai had other graces than this jolly despatch with which they transformed time into eternity. They accepted a stern code of honor—Bushido* or the Way of the Knight—whose central theory was its definition of virtue: “the power of deciding upon a certain course of conduct in accordance with reason, without wavering; to die when it is right to die, to strike when it is right to strike.”12 They were tried by their own code, but it was more severe than the common law.13 They despised all material enterprise and gain, and refused to lend, borrow or count money; they seldom broke a promise, and they risked their lives readily for anyone who appealed to them for just aid. They made a principle of hard and frugal living; they limited themselves to one meal a day, and accustomed themselves to eat any food that came to hand, and to hold it. They bore all suffering silently, and suppressed every display of emotion; their women were taught to rejoice when informed that their husbands had been killed on the battlefield.14 They recognized no obligation except that of loyalty to their superiors; this was, in their code, a higher law than parental or filial love. It was a common thing for a Samurai to disembowel himself on the death of his lord, in order to serve and protect him in the other world. When the Shogun Iyemitsu was dying in 1651 he reminded his prime minister, Hotto, of this duty of junshi, or “following in death”; Hotto killed himself without a word, and several subordinates imitated him.15 When the Emperor Mutsuhito went to his ancestors in 1912 General Nogi and his wife committed suicide in loyalty to him.16 Not even the traditions of Rome’s finest soldiers bred greater courage, asceticism and self-control than were demanded by the code of the Samurai.

  The final law of Bushido was hara-kiri—suicide by disembowelment. The occasions when this would be expected of a Samurai were almost beyond count, and the practice of it so frequent that little notice was taken of it. If a man of rank had been condemned to death he was allowed, as an expression of the emperor’s esteem, to cut through his abdomen from left to right and then down to the pelvis with the small sword which he always carried for this purpose. If he had been defeated in battle, or had been compelled to surrender, he was as like as not to rip open his belly. (Hara-kiri means belly-cutting; it is a vulgar word seldom used by the Japanese, who prefer to call it seppuku.) When, in 1895, Japan yielded to European pressure and abandoned Liaotung, forty military men committed hara-kiri in protest. During the war of 1905 many officers and men in the Japanese navy killed themselves rather than be captured by the Russians. If his superior did something offensive to him, the good Samurai might gash himself to death at his master’s gate. The art of seppuku—the precise ritual of ripping�
�was one of the first items in the education of Samurai youth; and the last tribute of affection that could be paid to a friend was to stand by him and cut off his head as soon as he had carved his paunch.17 Out of this training, and the traditions bound up with it, has come some part of the Japanese soldier’s comparative fearlessness of death.*

  Murder, like suicide, was allowed occasionally to replace the law. Feudal Japan economized on policemen not only by having many bonzes, but by allowing the son or brother of a murdered man to take the law into his own hand; and this recognition of the right of revenge, though it begot half the novels and plays of Japanese literature, intercepted many crimes. The Samurai, however, usually felt called upon to commit hara-kiri after exercising this privilege of personal revenge. When the famous Fortyseven Ronin (“Wave Men”—i.e., unattached Samurai), to avenge a death, had cut off the head of Kotsuké no Suké with supreme courtesy and the most refined apologies, they retired in dignity to estates named by the Shogun, and neatly killed themselves (1703). Priests returned Kotsuké’s head to his retainers, who gave them this simple receipt:

  Memorandum:

  Item: One head.

  Item: One paper parcel.

  The above articles are acknowledged to have been received.

  (Signed) Sayada Mogobai

  Saito Kunai

  This is probably the most famous and typical event in the history of Japan, and one of the most significant for the understanding of Japanese character. Its protagonists are still, in the popular view, heroes and saints; to this day pious hands deck their graves, and incense never ceases to rise before their resting place.19

  Towards the end of Iyeyasu’s regency two brothers, Sakon and Naiki, twenty-four and seventeen years of age respectively, tried to kill him because of wrongs which they felt that he had inflicted upon their father. They were caught as they entered the camp, and were sentenced to death. Iyeyasu was so moved by their courage that he commuted their sentences to self-disembowelment; and in accord with the customs of the time he included their younger brother, the eight-year-old Hachimaro, in this merciful decree. The physician who attended the boys has left us a description of the scene:

  When they were all seated in a row for final despatch, Sakon turned to the youngest and said—“Go thou first, for I wish to be sure that thou doest it right.” Upon the little one’s replying that, as he had never seen seppuku performed, he would like to see his brothers do it, and then he could follow them, the older brothers smiled between their tears:—“Well said, little fellow. So canst thou well boast of being our father’s child.” When they had placed him between them, Sakon thrust the dagger into the left side of his abdomen and said—“Look, brother! Dost understand now? Only, don’t push the dagger too far, lest thou fall back. Lean forward, rather, and keep thy knees well composed.” Naiki did likewise, and said to the boy—“Keep thine eyes open, or else thou mayst look like a dying woman. If thy dagger feels anything within and thy strength fails, take courage, and double thy effort to cut across.” The child looked from one to the other, and when both had expired, he calmly half denuded himself and followed the example set him on either hand.20

  II. THE LAW

  The first code—Group responsibility—Punishments

  The legal system of Japan was a vigorous supplement to private assassination and revenge. It had its origins partly in the ancient usages of the people, partly in the Chinese codes of the seventh century; law accompanied religion in the migration of culture from China to Japan.21 Tenchi Tenno began the formulation of a system of laws which was completed and promulgated under the boy Emperor Mommu in 702. In the feudal epoch this and other codes of the imperial age fell into disuse, and each fief legislated independently; the Samurai recognized no law beyond the will and decrees of his Daimyo”22

  Until 1721 it was the custom of Japan to hold the entire family responsible for the good behavior of each member, and, in most localities, to charge each family in a group of five with responsibility for all. The grown sons of an adult who had been condemned to be crucified or burned were executed with him, and his younger sons, on coming of age, were banished.23 Ordeal was used in medieval trials, and torture remained popular, in its milder forms, till modern times. The Japanese used the rack on some Christians, in vengeful imitation of the Inquisition; but more often their subtle minds were content to bind a man with ropes into a constrained position that became more agonizing with every minute.24 Whippings for trifling offenses were frequent, and death could be earned by any one of a great variety of crimes. The Emperor Shomu (724-56) abolished capital punishment and made compassion the rule of government; but crime increased after his death, and the Emperor Konin (770-81) not only restored the death penalty, but decreed that thieves should be publicly scourged until they died.25 Capital punishment also took the form of strangling, beheading, crucifixion, quartering, burning, or boiling in oil.26 Iyeyasu put an end to the old custom of pulling a condemned man in two between oxen, or binding him to a public post and inviting each passer-by to take a turn in cutting through him, from shoulder to crotch, with a saw.27 Iyeyasu laid it down that the frequent resort to severe punishments proved not the criminality of the people so much as the corruption and incompetence of the officials.28 Yoshimune was disgusted to find that the prisons of his time had no sanitary arrangements, and that among the prisoners were several whose trials, though begun sixteen years back, were still unfinished, so that the accusations against them were forgotten, and the witnesses were dead.29 This most enlightened of the shoguns reformed the prisons, improved and accelerated judicial procedure, abolished family responsibility, and labored sedulously for years to formulate the first unified code of Japanese feudal law (1721).

  III. THE TOILERS

  Castes—An experiment in the nationalization of land—State fixing of wages—A famine—Handicrafts—Artisans and guilds

  In the imperial age society had been divided into eight sei or castes; in the feudal epoch these were softened into four classes: Samurai, artisans, peasants, and merchants—the last being also, in social ranking, least. Beneath these classes was a large body of slaves, numbering some five per cent of the population, and composed of criminals, war-captives, or children seized and sold by kidnappers, or children sold into slavery by their parents.*30 Lower even than these slaves was a caste of pariahs known as Eta, considered despicable and unclean by Buddhist Japan because they acted as butchers, tanners and scavengers.32

  The great bulk of the population (which numbered in Yoshimune’s days some thirty millions), was composed of peasant proprietors, intensively cultivating that one-eighth of Japan’s mountainous soil which lends itself to tillage.† In the Nara period the state nationalized the land, and rented it to the peasant for six years or, at most, till death; but the government discovered that men did not care to improve or properly care for land that might in a short time be assigned to others; and the experiment ended in a restoration of private ownership, with state provision of funds in the spring to finance the planting and reaping of the crops.33 Despite this aid, the life of the peasant was not one of degenerative ease. His farm was a tiny tract, for even in feudal days one square mile had to support two thousand men.34 He had to contribute annually to the state thirty days of forced labor, during which death by a spear-thrust might be the penalty of a moment’s idleness. ‡35 The government took from him, in taxes and levies of many kinds, 6% of his product in the seventh century, 72% in the twelfth, and 40% in the nineteenth.37 His tools were of the simplest sort; his clothing was poor and slight in the winter, and usually nothing at all in the summer; his furniture was a rice-pot, a few bowls, and some chopsticks; his home was a hut so flimsy that half a week sufficed to build it.38 Every now and then earthquakes leveled his cottage, or famine emptied his frame. If he worked for another man his wages, like all wages in Tokugawa Japan, were fixed by the government;39 but this did not prevent them from being cruelly low. In one of the most famous works of Japanese literature—Kamo Ch
omei’s Hojoki—the author describes, as crowded into the eight years between 1177 and 1185, an earthquake, a famine, and a fire that almost destroyed Kyoto.* His eyewitness account of the famine of 1181 is one of the classic examples of Japanese prose:

  In all the provinces people left their lands and sought other parts, or, forgetting their homes, went to live among the hills. All kinds of prayers were begun, and even religious practices which were unusual in ordinary times were revived, but to no purpose whatever. . . . The inhabitants of the capital offered to sacrifice their valuables of all kinds, one after another (for food), but nobody cared to look at them. . . . Beggars swarmed by the roadsides, and our ears were filled with the sound of their lamentations. . . . Everybody was dying of hunger; and as time went on our condition became as desperate as that of the fish in the small pool of the story. At last even respectable-looking people wearing hats, and with their feet covered, might be seen begging importunately from door to door. Sometimes, while you wondered how such utterly wretched creatures could walk at all, they fell down before your eyes. By garden walls or on the roadsides countless persons died of famine, and as their bodies were not removed, the world was filled with evil odors. As their bodies changed there were many sights which the eyes could not endure to see. . . . People who had no means pulled down their houses and sold the materials in the market. It was said that a load for one man was not enough to provide him with sustenance for a single day. It was strange to see, among this firewood, pieces adorned in places with vermilion, or silver, or gold leaf. . . . Another very pitiable thing was that when there were a man and a woman who were strongly attached to each other, the one whose love was the greater, and whose devotion was the more profound, always died first. The reason was that they put themselves last, and, whether man or woman, gave up to the dearly beloved one anything which they might chance to have begged. As a matter of course, parents died before their children. Again, infants might be seen clinging to the breast of their mother, not knowing that she was already dead. . . . The number of those who died in central Kyoto during the fourth and fifth months alone was 42,300.40